The idea for this project came to me while I was writing my master's dissertation on the influence of social media on democracy. Through my studies, I became aware of a number of initiatives to control online discourse.
I don't deny the importance of making online debate more respectful and grounded in reality. However, I have concerns about the methods currently being employed to achieve this goal.
For instance, the notion that public institutions cannot be doubted at the risk of leading to the collapse of the social order is more in line with totalitarian regimes than democratic ones (especially when people start getting arrested because of this).
Fact-checking and content moderation, in turn, rely too much on the (always subjective) assessment of what is true and what is false. Automatic content filtering by social media platforms is even worse. For me, it is indistinguishable from prior censorship.
That's why I propose that we focus on good journalistic practices, such as those advocated by The Trust Project. I believe their adoption is recommended not only for large news organizations but also for independent journalists and bloggers.
The way I decided to help spread these practices was by incorporating them into this project. (Obviously, I haven't and won't be able to incorporate all of them, but I'm doing my best.)
Since I expect this tool to be used to criticize authorities (¿Hay gobierno? ¡Soy contra!), I'm trying to make it censorship-resistant. Or, at least, I'm focusing on ways to integrate it with web services that are more difficult to censor.
For example, I am favoring a strategy of monetizing websites by subscribing to newsletters over a monetization model based on advertising (largely controlled by one company) because website owners will always have the option of taking their readers to other services if they are unfairly blocked by one of them.
Static site generators are unlikely to be as easy to use as a blogging or microblogging platform, but the freedom they provide is worth the effort. In this respect, LibreBlog has an advantage. It works entirely within the browser (i.e., it doesn't require command line tools), which gives it the feel of a blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger.
Interested in seeing how it works? Visit our GitHub repository.